7 July 2014. A World to Win News Service. Three Israeli youths, Naftali Frenkel, Gilad Shaer, both 16, and Eyal Yifrach, 19, were kidnapped near the West Bank city of Hebron 12 June and subsequently murdered. On 2 July, 16-year-old Mohammed Abu Khdair was kidnapped in Jerusalem and burned alive. In both cases, Israel manifested the vicious and loathsome essence of the guiding Zionist principle it openly proclaims, that no law or morality is higher than the maintenance of a Jewish state in Palestine.

No matter who was responsible for the death of the three settler teenagers, the Israeli government treated it as a godsend for their project. Their concern was not so much to find the killers – the government claimed it knew who they were and was certain about their affiliation with Hamas – but to take it as a pretext to impose collective punishment on Palestinians within the borders of Israel and on the West Bank, and to justify their attacks on Gaza.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu did not call for justice. He called for “revenge”. The head of the biggest Zionist world youth movement called for the Israeli army to model itself on and surpass a Biblical story in which Jews mutilate the penises of 300 men from a people Israelis consider the ancestors of today’s Palestinians.

Israeli troops destroyed the homes of the families of the two Palestinian men the government named as suspects in the kidnapping, and family members were taken into custody. During the three weeks before the Israelis’ bodies were found, in “Operation Brother’s Keeper” Israeli security forces killed at least six Palestinians, including the 15-year old Mahmoud Dudeen, arrested 545 people and violently invaded 1,300 Palestinian homes, educational institutions and other sites.

This official policy of taking revenge on Palestinians as a people – demonstrating that Arabs have no rights in Israeli eyes and violently asserting that might makes right – set the tone for what followed.

When Israeli soldiers invaded the Jenin refugee camp on the West Bank and shot the 16-year-old Palestinian youth Abu Zagha in the chest, they celebrated this as an act of “revenge” on their Facebook account, Kulanuu. Some 70,000 people “liked” their page with its photo of the teenager’s bloody corpse.

Free of official constraint and urged on by Jewish religious and political authorities, on several occasions mobs of first dozens and then hundreds of people gathered in Jerusalem to chant “Kill the Arabs”. They demanded that passers-by say what time it was so that they could check their accents, and stopped cars to determine if their occupants were Jewish. They harassed, roughed up and in some cases beat people suspected of being Arabs.

Israeli media reported that the Israelis arrested and charged with the death of the young Palestinian burned alive in East Jerusalem had participated in those anti-Arab pogroms a few hours earlier. (Pogrom is the term for anti-Jewish riots carried out by Russians with the encouragement of the Czarist regime during the early twentieth century.)

It would have been hard for the Netanyahu government not to arrests suspects in his killing, because Palestinians released two videos showing two young men about to grab the boy, whom they found sitting alone in the darkness outside his parents’ home before morning prayers. The kidnappers’ car is also visible. Witnesses chased the fleeing car, and wrote down the license plate number. The same car was also filmed in an unsuccessful attempt to kidnap an nine-year-old Palestinian child the day before.

Yet when Mohammed Abu Khdair’s burned body was found, the Israeli authorities claimed to have no idea what had happened to him. Their first response was to seal off the Shuafat neighbourhood in East Jerusalem where he lived and used rubber-coated bullets, live rounds, tear gas and clubs to clear the streets of protesters gathering around his family’s home. Red Crescent medics say 170 Palestinians were injured, including half a dozen journalists.

The revelation that he was burned to death came from a Palestinian forensic official present at the autopsy and not the Israeli government. Later, a Palestinian Authority official said that Abu Khdair “was probably forced to drink fuel” before he was set on fire.

At first, the police announced they were focusing on “moral or criminal motives”, implying that Palestinians were responsible. This encouraged Israeli social media rumours that the boy’s own family murdered him because they thought he was homosexual, with the fact that he had been burned alive somehow supposedly proof that it was a Moslem “honour killing”. This view of Arabs as morally inferior subhumans had been stated by Netanyahu himself, after the three Israelis were killed, when he said “our enemies” – Palestinians – “sanctify death and we sanctify life. They sanctify cruelty and we sanctify mercy.”

The police refused to release the boy’s body during the day after the autopsy, so that he could be buried immediately according to both Jewish and Moslem custom. They tried to turn over his body to his family in the middle of the next night, when the authorities hoped fewer people would attend the funeral.

Netanyahu labelled Khdair’s killing “despicable”. It may have been, for his government, inconvenient, but the idea that the men who killed him were an aberration and not a product of Israeli society and official policy was proved false by what happened to Mohammed Abu Khdair’s 15-year-old cousin Tariq Abu Khdair.

Mohammed’s cousin Tariq was present during a protest in East Jerusalem on the day of the funeral, attended by thousands. The police fired tear gas and stun grenades at the large crowd marching down the street. Police grabbed the boy. A now widely-seen mobile phone video shows him lying on the ground on his stomach, his hands bound behind his back, while two police repeatedly punch him in the face and stomp on his back and skull.

The other police who came on the scene did not rescue Tariq. Instead, they arrested him. Eventually he was hospitalized but the police came to carry him off to jail.

Tariq’s family says he was just watching the protest when the police grabbed him at random. Israeli officials claim that he had fought with police and was carrying a slingshot. Even if that were true, there is not much moral difference between viciously beating one unconscious, hog-tied Palestinian boy and burning another one, except that Tariq happened to survive.

Tariq might have been allowed – or forced – to die in custody or rotted in prison like so many hundreds of other Palestinian children if he had not turned out to be an American, and if his American aunt had not called attention to the video and clearly and very articulately explained, in American English, just what happened. She also called attention to the many other “cousins” – the many boys the police beat that day and before. Even the U.S. State Department was forced to mouth that while it would not do anything to help the child, it was “profoundly troubled” – in other words, embarrassed by this exposure of some truth about a country that would not exist without American aid and military backing. The Netanyahu government’s response was to sentence him to house arrest – without a trial – until he and his family return to Florida.

Since Mohammad’s burned body was found, some of the biggest protests seen in recent years have broken out throughout the West Bank, and, significantly, Arab towns within Israel’s formal borders, from the north to the Negav desert in the south. Residents of the neighbourhoods remaining to Palestinians in Jerusalem are reportedly forming watch groups to keep out Israeli civilian marauders. Israelis have also organized protests against the treatment of Palestinians, and some are said to have joined the watch groups. Israeli authorities are pressuring and threatening Arab traditional leaders and politicians in Israel to “restore peace”.

On the West Bank, the Palestinian Authority police, whose ability to control Palestinian youth would be key in any “two-state” solution, have lost more legitimacy than ever because of their complicity with the Israeli military’s revenge campaign that led to Mohammed’s murder.

There are likely to be wider regional repercussions.

This atrocious crime – so poorly timed, from the point of view of the overall Zionist project – shows that Israel can not so easily turn off the golem (a sort of Jewish Frankenstein), the settler movement and the “national religious” (sort of a Jewish ISIS) fanatics they created. But, in the end, what interests do these seething, blood-thirsty forces serve?

As consciously reactionary as many gun-totting settlers and their urban counterparts are, including a penchant for personally bullying, beating and sometimes killing Palestinians, they are simply eager beneficiaries of policies implemented by all Israeli governments and funded by Washington, and, in the end, one of the resources used by the U.S., which cannot do without its Zionist outpost in a highly contested region it needs to dominate if it is to keep its position in the world.

end item-

Correction

Several recent articles incorrectly referred to the Kurdish Autonomous Regional Government in Iraq. The correct name is the Kurdish Regional Government.

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Editorial:

Introducing a transformed AWTWNS

14 March 2017. A World to Win News Service. With great joy, the editors of A World To Win News Service announce its transformation into a more thorough-going tool for revolution based on Bob Avakian's new synthesis of communism.

AWTW News Service first saw life in January 2003, at a critical juncture when under the banner of their global "war on terror" the US-led imperialists had launched and were expanding what was in fact a war for empire. After invading Afghanistan, they were preparing to invade Iraq. It was a time when a powerful people's war was surging forward in Nepal, led by revolutionaries who were participants in the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement. RIM gathered communists from around the world who, in the wake of the defeat of the revolution in China following the death of Mao Tsetung, banded together from the five continents to strengthen the struggle to do away with the capitalist system through revolution.

AWTW News Service was inspired by RIM, which based itself on Marxism-Leninism-Maoism (MLM). During the years since then, the news service untiringly exposed the crimes of the imperialists in many corners of the globe, bringing to light stories of popular resistance against oppression, analysing how all oppression was ultimately rooted in the system of capitalism-imperialism, and pointing to the need for the solution, revolution.

These past fourteen years have seen major developments, including the collapse of RIM itself. Not only are some of the forces previously united in RIM now sharply opposed to each other, the previous understanding of revolutionary communism itself has, to borrow Mao Zedong’s term, "divided into two". One strand of the old Maoism has wound up in a social-democratic liquidation of the core revolutionary principles of Marxism, exemplified tragically in the capitulation of the Maoist leadership in Nepal and the termination of the revolutionary war there. Others from the previous MLM movement are stuck in a dogmatist, religious-like upholding of sterile "Maoist" formulas that are equally devoid of revolutionary content. In opposition to this, Bob Avakian's new synthesis of communism has fully emerged, rescuing the scientific kernel of communism while criticizing and repudiating those secondary aspects in the past understanding and actions of communists that have actually gone against communism's liberatory nature. The result is that we now have a qualitatively more scientific framework for understanding the world and changing it through revolution, which is gaining adherents from among forces previously part of RIM as well as others more recently attracted to communism. (For more on RIM, its history, its collapse and the division of Maoism into two, see Communism: The Beginning of a New Stage – A Manifesto from the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA and Letter to Participating Parties and Organizations of the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement by the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA.)

And how the world cries out for revolution! Everywhere inequality has intensified, women face the violent intensification of patriarchy and degradation, and whole states in parts of the Third World are written off as "failed" and left to rot. The hopes of millions worldwide that soared as US-backed dictators were toppled by mass uprisings in the “Arab Spring” were dashed with the re-consolidation of reactionary rule. War has ripped gaping wounds in the Middle East as the Western imperialists and their local allies contend with reactionary Islamic jihadists, trapping the masses in a vortex of terror and despair. Millions have been driven from their homes, and thousands drown in desperate attempts to cross the Mediterranean to safety – while those few who make it face ever higher walls erected by these same imperialists to keep them out, physical walls as well as the walls of hatred being whipped up against them. Now, after years of normalizing mounting levels of nationalist jingoism, racism and misogyny, the dynamics of this system have propelled the fascist Donald Trump into the post of commander-in-chief of US imperialism. This in turn is giving major impetus to fascist movements that have been steadily gnawing their way into the political mainstream of Europe – in Austria, Hungary and Poland, and now the Netherlands, France, Germany and elsewhere. Throughout the oppressed nations too, the rise of “strong men” like India's Modi, Turkey's Erdogan, Duterte in the Philippines and others, tells the same story: the post-World War 2 order is rapidly coming apart at the seams.

The most fundamental question facing humanity today is whether this great turmoil will give rise to the establishment of regimes that are far more repressive and reactionary than even those today, with an unprecedented intensification of oppression and inequality, the unleashing of war and famine, environmental catastrophe and potentially far worse, or whether the oppressed can be enabled to rise, led by a core of conscious revolutionaries, and dismantle the existing state apparatuses in key parts of the world and establish radically new state powers that begin to do away with all oppression and exploitation. This has everything to do with how well hundreds and thousands today can be armed with a scientific approach to reality and act on that basis. Today this means transforming AWTW News Service into one firmly based on Avakian's new communism, a task that is proudly being assumed by the communists who have been the driving force in it over these years – a task that you are being asked to join in, in countless ways: reposting, distributing, writing, reporting, debating and corresponding with it, to name but a few.

Articles are needed that lay bare how the source of every kind of oppression in every country is ultimately rooted in the capitalist-imperialist system, whether it be through analysing the coup d'etat in Turkey, the failure of the Syriza experiment in Greece, the rise of fascism in the US and Europe, etc.

The news service needs analysis that lays bare the major faultlines ripping through every class-divided society and propelling millions into questioning and resistance, to help increasing numbers make the leap from being fighters on one front against capitalist oppression to fighters on every front. To take just one example, it needs to highlight the many different ways that brave forces are stepping outside normal channels to resist the draconian measures being enacted against migrants, exposing how it is the capitalist-imperialist system that is driving immigration and clamping down on migrants. It has to help establish a powerful internationalist current around this burning issue – showing why and how it is essential that the "whole world comes first", rather than "what does this mean for me and my country" – so as to bridge borders between peoples, to change not only what people think but how they think, to train them in the communist line and outlook. Or, in relation to patriarchy, to bring out why you cannot break all the links in the chain of capitalist oppression except one, why leaving male supremacy unchallenged quickly opens the door to the strengthening of every form of division and inequality. All this is part of the process of "fighting the power and transforming the people, for revolution" – and not least of all, bringing forth a new generation of revolutionary leaders in this process, who can use this news service to help identify and bring together more revolutionary forces wherever they may be.

It is critical to expose the system and its institutions and structures, but it is also vital to put forward the solution, a new kind of state power and a new way of organising the society and economy to meet people's needs in the broadest, most liberating sense, and step-by-step enable people to make the transition, through revolution, to a whole new world of flourishing humanity, armed with critical thinking and free of the shackles of class, patriarchy and all social divisions and inequalities. To do this we need to take on and tear apart the reactionary verdict on revolution and socialism. Otherwise, our criticism of the existing system loses force and purpose. Furthermore, based on the new synthesis summation of the socialist experiences of the 20th century, we need to show the necessity, possibility and desirability of Avakian's re-envisaged socialist society – how it not only meets the basic needs of the people, but will be a vibrant society marked by an unprecedented flourishing of intellectual and cultural life.

Without BA's new communism and the understanding that has developed on the basis of his approach and method, even for those who have vital elements of understanding about how thoroughly rotten all that exists really is, it is difficult to understand that the world doesn't have to be the way it is, that the potential for a radically different way of living for all humanity lies entangled in today's web of contradictions that are driving society, trapping oppressed humanity in dog-eat-dog relations, and threatening unprecedented disasters. Avakian's visionary understanding of the goal of communism shows how that is not only possible, but an urgent necessity, crying out for action right now.

With this understanding as the solid foundation of the news service, its pages will be open to others who, from different perspectives and approaches, bring to the light of day otherwise hidden stories of resistance and opposition to the prevailing order, shed light on the crimes of the system and how it works, reveal the complexity of the forces at work, and do all this in a way that compels others to turn to this site as a vibrant hub of critical analysis and debate. To truly become a weapon for revolution in growing parts of the world, articles need to be shared, correspondence is needed, key articles translated into different languages, and more. To further this, the news service will rupture from its weekly edition format that has been more oriented to the print media epoch, and instead focus on releasing articles on the Web hot on the heels of major events in the world. We need contributions from all those able to help so that the now far too narrow scope of our articles, limited by our current abilities, can begin to better match the needs of what must necessarily be a global revolutionary process.

Hard truths need to be stated clearly from the outset: the strength of the forces worldwide fighting for communist revolution pales in comparison to the immense challenges before us. But it is an even more important truth that never before in history has there existed a clearer and more scientific understanding of the source of oppression and what is needed to do away with it. On this foundation, A World To Win News Service can and must become a powerful tool serving all those who long for an end to oppression and exploitation, drawing forward and training thousands and influencing millions in many countries around the world, hastening the day when humanity can break free of the shackles that have enchained it for all too long.